The Attack of the Clones
>impersonator seems to be a boob guy Good taste, my man. ~ Jesse, finding the good in the bad The Attack of the Clones was an event on TF2Tags, happening way too fucking late at night on February 20th 2016, where the site was suddenly bombarded with shitposts from a bunch of dummy accounts impersonating other taggers. While the posts dominated site discussion for a while, the event is mostly remembered for its tumultuous aftermath, wherein AFI was banned again and Dr. Dos declared his general distaste for the site's antics. Shitposting Dr. Dos, if there has ever been a reason to ban somebody, this is it... ~ Makin' Bacon, unwittingly portending a '''very' bad omen.'' The main distinguishing feature of the shitposting in question is that it involved multiple accounts pretending to be "clones" of existing users (hence the whole "clones" motif). Among the taggers impersonated were Makin' Bacon, Bonkspenser, several Smash Z's (Probably because Maximum Overdrive ''was a perfect form of shitposting), and a few others. The method of spamming ran thusly: * They created a new Steam account with no details * Logged in to the site with said account * Named themselves after somebody else * Then used up all 5 posts allotted to new taggers before repeating the process. Despite the seemingly threatening MO, the 5-post submission limit meant that the bouts of spamming were short and not really effective at disrupting anything. See, ''this is why the limits exist. Tagger's reactions were mixed. Most taggers took the event in jest, as the impostor was laughably easy to spot and the jokes were predictable at best (mostly consisting of crude sexual humor, dead-horse cliches and the occasional Lenny face). Smash Z in particular was delighted to have multiple spammers under his name, and he and Jesse egged them on in-between bouts. Others were either annoyed or simply indifferent, but ultimately the prevailing mood was "roll up, roll up, come and see the freak!". That is, until later in the day. The Aftermath Of course, no one bothered to do anything about this impostor mainly due to many finding it humorous. Fancytag, on the other hand, was really fed up with the impostor's shenanigans and notified DOS about the shitposter and asked him to put an end to their buttfuckery. That afternoon, Dos made a post confirming his response to the situation, having banned the culprit and deleted his submissions. In the comments, however, he had also made what could be considered a rant against the general TF2Tags community and its behaviour. He began with a sarcastic acknowledgement of the culprit, followed by an explanation as to why this sort of thing can't be dealt with preventatively: "Shoutouts to whoever had the IP 24.247.137.205. I meant to look up your items to delete your trash but accidentally deleted every item you ever submitted instead. So here's the thing! I can't just disable name changes because you can just change your name on steam. Nor can I disable using a name already in use because then somebody will inevitably have their name stolen. I wake up this morning, go to the site, and see an entire page of items that are just 'AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA'. So yes I am banning them." This quickly segued into "pissed off" mode: "I am absolutely fed up with this site and want everybody here to know the only reason I haven't shut it down is because it puts a few bucks of ad revenue in my pocket each month. And frankly, I'm not sure if that's worth the sporadic headache of 'Dos somebody is fucking up the site', banning the people fucking up the site, 'Dos why did you ban person X who was fucking up the site, it was a joke, the other person was fucking it up deliberately' I am tired of people being jerks because they think it's funny, and I am even more tired of people clamoring to bring those jerks back because they found them funny." To demonstrate his point, he promptly rebanned AFI (who was responsible for the pageful of AAAAAAAAAA items mentioned above), which was confirmed in this transcript of a Steam chat between AFI and Jesse: 9:24 AM - NullenHL2B: You got banned on: Feb. 20, 2016, midnight You'll be unbanned on: Jan. 1, 2050, midnight Here are the notes on why you were banned: "AAAAAAAAA" (Note: NullenHL2B is AFI's Steam username.) Essentially, Dos had made an ultimatum with the site; stop being a bunch of wankers, or the site gets shut down. The site reaction wasn't as rancorous as you'd might expect, probably because everyone was suddenly reminded that Dos could shut the site down if he wanted to. Most people acknowledged their fuckwaddery and made vows to act in better taste, although AFI's seemingly final departure was still lamented by all (apart from a vindictive Frapple). Digi_ pulled a LANCB over both the banning and the implication of Dos being in it for the revenue, but that didn't last long. So who was it? Some dipshit AFI-wannabe named "Shitposter of 2016". He got the trademark "ban 'till 2050" for his trouble, and all of his crappy submissions are gone. He will not be missed. Apparently he's been unbanned because who knows why. Prior to his admission of being the culprit, there were many non-serious rumors as to who the perp was. Relk_Cehi, Teaquin and even Dr. Dos himself were all names being thrown around, with mostly spur-of-the-moment justifications. Category:History